[4]. Mr. Burke pretends in this Jesuitical Appeal, that a nation has a right to insist upon and revert to old establishments and prescriptive privileges, but not to lay claim to new ones; in a word, to change its governors, if refractory, but not its form of government, however bad. Thus he says we had a right to cashier James II., because he wished to alter the laws and religion as they were then established. By what right did we emancipate ourselves from popery and arbitrary power a century before? He defends his consistency in advocating the American Revolution, though the rebels, in getting rid of the reigning branch of the Royal Family, did not send for the next of kin to rule over them ‘in contempt of their choice,’ but prevented all such equivocations by passing at once from a viceroyalty to a republic. He also extols the Polish Revolution as a monument of wisdom and virtue (I suppose because it had not succeeded), though this also was a total and absolute change in the frame and principles of the government, to which the people were in this case bound by no feudal tenure or divine right. But he insists that the French Revolution was stark-naught, because the people here did the same thing, passed from slavery to liberty, from an arbitrary to a constitutional government, to which they had, it seems, no prescriptive right, and therefore, according to the appellant, no right at all. Oh nice professor of humanity! We had a right to turn off James II. because he broke a compact with the people. The French had no right to turn off Louis XVI. because he broke no compact with them, for he had none to break; in other words, because he was an arbitrary despot, tied to no laws, and they a herd of slaves, and therefore they were bound, by every law divine and human, always to remain so, in perpetuity and by the grace of God! Oh unanswerable logician!
[5]. There is none of this perplexity and jarring of different objects in the tools of power. Their jealousies, heart-burnings, love of precedence, or scruples of conscience, are made subservient to the great cause in which they are embarked; they leave the amicable division of the spoil to the powers that be; all angry disputes are hushed in the presence of the throne, and the corrosive, fretful particles of human nature fly off, and are softened by the influence of a court atmosphere. Courtiers hang together like a swarm of bees about a honeycomb. Not so the Reformers; for they have no honeycomb to attract them. It has been said that Reformers are often indifferent characters. The reason is, that the ties which bind most men to their duties—habit, example, regard to appearances—are relaxed in them; and other and better principles are, as yet, weak and unconfirmed.
[6]. The above criticism first appeared in the Courier newspaper, and was copied the next day in the Chronicle with the following remarks:—‘The treasury journals complain of the harsh treatment shewn to ministers,—let us see how they treat their opponents. If the following does not come from the poetical pen of the Admiralty Croaker, it is a close imitation of his style.’
‘Strange that such difference should be
’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee!’
Whether it was from the fear of this supposed formidable critic, the noble Marquis ceased from this time nightly to ‘fillip the ears of his auditors with a three-man beetle!‘
[7]. As he is fond of the good old times before the Revolution, the writer might go still farther back to that magnanimous undertaking, concerted and executed by the same persons of honour, the partition of Poland.
[8]. See remarks on Judge Eyre’s Charge to the Jury, 1794, by W. Godwin.
[9]. Observe that these critically destructive terms of peace are not strictly called for by Bonaparte’s persevering and atrocious outrages, but are at all times rendered necessary by the everlasting enmity of France.
[10]. ‘In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage.’ There is nothing so provoking as these matter-of-fact Utopia-mongers.